From his first moments on Earth, Edward appears to be in commune with water. His birth brings rain during the drought, his childhood brings snow to Alabama for the first time, and many of the most important moments of his life take place in, or near, water. This alleged influence over an element helps show Edward's remarkable powers of influence.

Water's importance foreshadows the final transformation Edward undertakes, in which he physically becomes the thing he'd always wished to be—a big fish. When he comes home to die, Edward swims in the backyard pool every day, as though, in the face of his inability to leave the house, it's an act of self-preservation. In each of William's versions of Edward's death, he asks for a glass of water, building up to the novel's final scene, when he directs William to drive him to a river.

In a play on the idiom 'big fish in a small pond,' Edward expresses his lifelong desire to be a "big fish in a big pond" (21). He pursues this goal of being a remarkable person in the worldby leaving the small town in which he grew up, and continuously seeking out adventures in his adult life.